You Think Blockchain Is a Scam Because Your Bank Works

Originally posted on X.

I work in blockchain. I’ve worked in this space for years now. And I have a confession: every time someone at a dinner party in Milan or Berlin says “crypto is just a casino,” I nod politely, change the subject, and move on with my evening.

I stopped arguing a long time ago.

Not because they’re right. Because the argument I’d need to make requires them to imagine a life they’ve never had to live. And that’s a hard thing to do over wine and appetizers.

But I’m done with the polite version. Because the gap between what I hear from the smartest people I know in Europe and what I see happening in Lagos, Buenos Aires, and Nairobi has gotten so wide that staying quiet feels irresponsible.

So this is the version I’ve been holding back. Not the pitch. Not the whitepaper summary. The thing I actually think when you tell me “blockchain is a solution looking for a problem”.

You’re right that you don’t need it. You’re wrong that nobody does.

I - The Dinner that changed how I talk about this

I was at a conference in Lisbon about three years ago. One of those events where people from forty countries sit in the same room and pretend they’re all having the same conversation. A colleague of mine - I’ll call him Emeka - works for a crypto exchange that operates across twenty African countries. He’s Nigerian, based in Lagos, and one of the calmest people I’ve ever met in an industry full of people who are not calm.

After a panel, a group of us ended up at dinner. Someone - a fintech founder from Amsterdam - made the standard remark. “I just don’t see what problem crypto solves that a good bank doesn’t solve better.”

Emeka put his fork down.

He didn’t get angry. He didn’t roll his eyes. He just said: “Last year, my cousin in Port Harcourt tried to send money to our aunt in Cameroon. It took six days and cost him nearly ten percent. His bank froze the transfer twice for compliance checks. Our aunt is seventy-three. She doesn’t have a bank account. She walks to a Western Union office forty minutes from her house. By the time the money arrived, she’d already borrowed from a neighbor to buy her medication.”

He paused.

“She doesn’t know what a blockchain is. She doesn’t care. But the system you’re telling me works fine? It doesn’t work fine for her. It never has.”

The table went quiet. Not because Emeka was being dramatic. Because he wasn’t.

And that’s the thing I keep coming back to. The people who are loudest about crypto being a scam are almost always people for whom the current system works beautifully. Their banks function. Their currency is stable. Their government doesn’t freeze accounts arbitrarily. Their salary arrives on time, in a denomination that will buy roughly the same groceries next month as this month.

That’s not the planet most people live on. And until you understand that, you will never understand what blockchain is actually for.

II - The privilege you can’t see

Here’s a number that should reframe this entire conversation for you.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the most expensive region on Earth to send money to. The average cost of a $200 remittance is nearly eight percent. That means a family receiving $200 from a relative working abroad loses roughly $16 before the money even lands. In some corridors, it’s worse. The fees climb above ten percent. The transfers take days.

Now consider that Nigeria alone received about $19.5 billion in remittances in 2023. Imagine eight percent of that disappearing into the pockets of intermediaries. That’s not a rounding error. That’s billions of dollars extracted annually from some of the poorest families on the planet by a system that most Europeans assume works because it works for them.

When you send money from your German bank account to your Italian one, it arrives same-day, costs almost nothing, and you don’t think about it. That experience is not universal. It’s an accident of geography and infrastructure. It’s a privilege so invisible that you’ve mistaken it for how the world works.

It’s not how the world works.

In 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria banned commercial banks from processing any cryptocurrency transactions. They froze accounts. They cut off exchanges. They tried to kill it.

It didn’t work.

Nigerians didn’t stop. They moved to Telegram. They traded peer-to-peer through WhatsApp groups. They met local agents in person to swap cash for USDT, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. The demand was so urgent, so foundational to people’s daily survival, that a government ban didn’t even slow it down. Students, freelancers, small business owners - they built an underground stablecoin economy because the alternative was watching their savings evaporate.

By 2024, Nigeria had become the second-largest crypto economy in the world by transaction volume. Eighty-five percent of that activity was transactions under a million dollars - meaning it was driven by everyday people, not Wall Street speculators.

The government eventually reversed the ban. Not because they changed their ideology. Because they realized they’d lost visibility into a financial system their citizens had already decided to build without permission.

Now I want you to try something. I want you to go to a dinner party in Lagos and tell someone that crypto is a casino. See how that goes.

III - The part you haven’t thought about

When people in Europe or North America hear the word “crypto,” they picture Bitcoin’s price chart. They picture some guy in a Discord server posting rocket emojis about a memecoin. They picture the FTX collapse. They picture speculation.

And they’re not entirely wrong. Speculation exists. Scams exist. People have lost money on things they didn’t understand.

But reducing blockchain to speculation is like reducing the internet to spam emails. It says something true while missing everything that matters.

Here’s what most people in the developed world have never had to think about.

What happens when your currency collapses

In April 2024, when Javier Milei took office in Argentina, annual inflation was roughly 200 percent. Two hundred percent. Imagine your grocery bill doubling in a year. Imagine your savings losing half their value while you sleep.

Argentines didn’t sit around debating the philosophical merits of decentralization. They bought stablecoins. According to Chainalysis, Argentina is the second-largest crypto market in Latin America, with around $94 billion in transaction volume. Over half of all purchases on exchanges using Argentine pesos go toward stablecoins. Not Bitcoin. Not Ethereum. Stablecoins. Digital dollars. Because what they needed wasn’t a speculative asset. They needed their money to still be money tomorrow.

Three out of four Argentine workers who receive their salary in crypto choose stablecoins. Not because they’re crypto enthusiasts. Because they’re trying to eat next month.

In Venezuela, the situation is even more stark. The New York Times reported that President Nicolás Maduro has effectively moved the country’s economy onto stablecoins. Venezuelans have a name for them: “Binance dollars.” When your national currency loses eighty percent of its value in a single year and inflation approaches 500 percent, you don’t need a whitepaper to explain why a dollar-pegged digital token is useful. You need a smartphone and five minutes.

Small business owners accept stablecoins as payment for goods and services. Freelancers receive compensation from international clients through blockchain transfers. Families use stablecoins to receive remittances from relatives abroad. In some communities, stablecoins function as a parallel financial system - rent, groceries, transportation, all settled through digital wallets.

This isn’t adoption driven by hype cycles. This is adoption driven by survival.

What happens when your government blocks your money

Remember Emeka’s story about the bank freezing his cousin’s transfer? That’s not an edge case. In Nigeria, about a third of adults have no access to formal financial services at all. Thirty-three million people. No bank account. No credit card. No savings instrument denominated in a currency that holds its value.

And for those who do have bank accounts, capital controls mean accessing US dollars through official channels is nearly impossible. The gap between the official exchange rate and the black-market rate can be enormous. When the naira plummeted to record lows in early 2024, stablecoin transactions in Nigeria approached $3 billion in a single quarter. People weren’t gambling. They were running from a burning building.

A Mercy Corps Ventures pilot in Kenya tested something simple: paying freelancers using stablecoins instead of traditional remittance channels. The fees dropped from 29 percent to 2 percent. Twenty-nine to two. The freelancers saved more money and accessed their earnings faster - even without a bank account.

I want that number to land. Twenty-nine percent to two percent. That’s not an incremental improvement. That’s the difference between a system designed to extract value from the people who can least afford to lose it and a system that actually works.

What this looks like at scale

Stablecoins now account for roughly 43 percent of all crypto transaction volume in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Nigeria specifically, the stablecoin USDT accounts for nearly 89 percent of all activity on Yellow Card, one of Africa’s largest crypto exchanges. Seventy percent of users rely on stablecoins for personal needs - remittances and savings, not trading.

In Latin America, 61 percent of crypto users are under 34 years old, and the primary use case is the same: protect your money, move it across borders, survive.

Globally, stablecoin transfer volumes reached $27.6 trillion in 2024, surpassing the combined transaction volumes of Visa and Mastercard. Not because of speculation. Because of utility.

When someone in Amsterdam tells me blockchain doesn’t solve a real problem, I think about these numbers and I think: you have no idea. You have no idea because you’ve never had to.

IV - The two worlds

There’s a pattern I see over and over in this industry, and it’s almost funny once you notice it.

In developed countries, the conversation about blockchain is philosophical. Is it decentralized enough? Is the technology elegant? Does it have regulatory approval? Is it a security or a commodity? People write think pieces about it. They debate it on panels. They express vaguely informed skepticism and feel sophisticated for doing so.

In developing countries, the conversation about blockchain is logistical. How do I convert my pesos before they lose more value? Which platform has the lowest fees for sending money to my mother? Can I pay my supplier in USDT so I don’t lose my margin to currency swings?

Do you see the difference?

In one world, blockchain is a topic. In the other, it’s a tool. And the people using it as a tool - the shopkeeper in Lagos keeping his working capital in digital dollars because the naira is in freefall, the freelancer in Nairobi getting paid in USDC and cashing out to M-Pesa in minutes, the family in Caracas receiving remittances that would have cost them a quarter of the transfer through traditional channels - those people are not confused about whether blockchain has value.

They know it has value because they use it every single day.

Emeka told me something else at that dinner in Lisbon that I think about constantly. He said: “In Nigeria, people don’t care about crypto. They care about what crypto does.”

That distinction is everything.

The people in Lagos and Buenos Aires and Nairobi aren’t believers in a technology. They’re not on a team. They’re not in a tribe. They found something that solved a problem their government and their banks couldn’t or wouldn’t solve, and they adopted it. Not because someone convinced them. Because necessity did.

And here’s the uncomfortable part for people in rich countries who are convinced they’ve seen through the hype: the adoption you’re dismissing as speculation is actually the most rational economic behavior on the planet. When your currency is collapsing, converting to a dollar-pegged digital asset isn’t gambling. It’s the opposite of gambling. It’s the only sane move.

V - The objection you’re about to make

I know what you’re thinking because I’ve heard it a hundred times.

“Fine, but what about the scams? What about the rug pulls? What about people losing their life savings to some meme token promoted by an influencer?”

Fair. All of that exists. All of that is real. And all of that is terrible.

But here’s the thing: bad actors exploiting a technology is not an argument against the technology. It’s an argument for better regulation, better education, and better infrastructure. People get scammed through email and nobody argues we should abolish email. People get robbed at ATMs and nobody argues we should abolish banks.

The existence of scams in the crypto space is real, and it matters, and the industry needs to take it more seriously. But using scams as a reason to dismiss the entire technology is intellectually lazy. It’s a way to feel smart about something you haven’t actually examined.

And the people who pay the highest price for that laziness? Not you. You have a functioning bank in a stable country. The people who pay are the ones in Lagos and Caracas and Buenos Aires who could benefit from better infrastructure, better regulation, and more institutional support for the tools they’re already using - but instead face dismissal from the people whose opinions actually shape global policy.

Your skepticism isn’t free. Someone else is paying for it.

VI - What you can actually do

I’m not asking you to buy crypto. I’m not asking you to become a blockchain evangelist or change your investment strategy or put on a laser-eyes profile picture.

I’m asking you to do something much simpler and much harder: update your mental model.

Stop conflating speculation with utility. When you hear “crypto,” stop automatically picturing a price chart. The most important thing happening in blockchain right now isn’t Bitcoin’s price. It’s a freelancer in Nairobi getting paid in seconds instead of weeks. It’s a family in Nigeria preserving their savings in digital dollars while the naira loses a third of its value. It’s a Venezuelan shopkeeper accepting stablecoins because his national currency doesn’t function anymore. The speculative layer exists. It’s loud. It gets the headlines. But underneath it, there’s an infrastructure layer that is quietly becoming essential financial plumbing for billions of people.

Talk to someone who actually uses it. Not a crypto trader in New York. Not someone trying to sell you on a token. Talk to someone from Nigeria, Argentina, Kenya, or Venezuela. Ask them what stablecoins mean to them. Ask them what they were doing before. You will hear stories that make your “crypto is a scam” take feel embarrassingly small. If you don’t know anyone from these countries, read the Chainalysis Geography of Crypto report. It’s free, it’s data-driven, and it will change how you think about this.

Notice the privilege. Next time you open your banking app and transfer money in three seconds for free, notice it. Notice that you live in a world where that’s possible. Notice that for a third of humanity, it isn’t. And then ask yourself whether your opinion about blockchain might be shaped less by what you know and more by what you’ve never had to know.

Push for better regulation, not dismissal. If you genuinely care about the scams, the rug pulls, the people getting hurt - the answer isn’t “ban it” or “ignore it.” The answer is smart, proportional regulation that makes the technology safer for the people who need it most. Europe’s MiCA framework is a start. But regulation built by people who think blockchain is a scam will produce regulation that protects incumbents, not users. Your informed engagement matters more than your dismissal.

VII - The window

Let me tell you what happened after that dinner in Lisbon.

Emeka and I ended up talking for another two hours at the hotel bar. He told me about his mother, who lives in Abuja. She’s sixty-seven. She doesn’t know what a blockchain is. But she receives money from her son in USDT, converted through an app on her phone that someone at church showed her how to use.

She used to receive money through Western Union. It took days and cost nearly ten percent. Now it takes minutes and costs almost nothing. She has no idea she’s using blockchain. She just knows the money comes faster and more of it arrives.

And then Emeka said something that stopped me.

“You know what my mum calls it? She calls it ‘the new way.’ That’s it. Not crypto. Not blockchain. ‘The new way.’ Because for her, there was the old way that didn’t work and now there’s this.”

I think about that phrase all the time. “The new way.” No ideology. No tribal affiliation. No portfolio. Just a thing that works where the old thing didn’t.

Here’s what I need you to understand: we are in a window right now where there are still people who remember what the old way felt like. People like Emeka’s mum, who lived decades inside a financial system that charged her for the privilege of being underserved. People in Argentina who remember when 200 percent inflation wasn’t a number in a textbook but the reason their family couldn’t afford school fees. People in Venezuela who watched their life savings become worthless not once but repeatedly, across generations.

These people found a tool that helps. Not a perfect tool. Not a tool without risks. But a tool that does something no other tool has done for them: it gives them access to a stable currency, borderless transfer, and financial participation on terms that don’t rob them blind.

And while they’re building entire economies on this technology - paying rent, saving for their children, sending money to their aging parents - you’re at a dinner party in Berlin saying it’s a casino.

I get it. I do. From where you’re sitting, it looks like noise.

But from where they’re sitting, it looks like the first fair deal they’ve ever been offered.

The question was never whether blockchain works. Billions of people have already answered that. The question is whether the people with the most influence, the most capital, and the loudest voices will help make it work better - or keep dismissing a revolution they were born too privileged to need.

You can read this and more stories on my Substack: